// HOW THE MONEY FLOWS
The deal, in plain words
This site runs no advertising at all. No Google AdSense, no ad network, no ad exchange, no retargeting pixel — no outside script chooses anything you see here, and nothing follows you off this site. That is not a promise about the future; it is a description of the page you are reading, and you can confirm it by viewing the source.
What is left is short. Broke to Built earns money in three ways, and only three:
- Referral links, always marked. A small number of links are referral links to tools we genuinely use ourselves. If you sign up or buy through one, the vendor pays us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Every one is labelled "Affiliate" on its face, names the company, and says in plain words how we use the thing ourselves. The complete current list is below — it is generated from the same file the links render from, so it cannot quietly go out of date.
- Optional templates, capped at $0.99. Some guides mention a related template or tool of ours, sold on an external marketplace — never on this site, and never required. Nothing linked from this site costs more than $0.99, and that ceiling is enforced by the build itself: a link to a pricier product does not render. Every guide is complete and free on its own.
- Paid work. Anthony takes on employment and contract work, and the company builds its own systems. That is the main way this operation is funded — the site is the shop window, not the till. Details are on the hire page.
Our rules on this
Disclosed, right there
Every affiliate link is marked as a referral where it appears. Never dressed up as "a discount we got you."
What we actually use
We don't recommend tools we haven't used ourselves. No pay-to-be-recommended, ever.
On the pages that matter most
Every guide puts all the free help first. At most one clearly-labeled optional tool at the very end — never wedged into the middle of it, and never before you have what you came for.
Costs you nothing extra
Affiliate pricing is the same price you'd pay anyway. Every time.
The current affiliate relationships
This list is generated from the same file our ad units render from, so it cannot quietly fall out of date. These are the relationships we have today:
- Marketplace listings of our own templates (e.g., on PromptBase or Payhip) may use the marketplace's referral mechanism, which lowers the fee the marketplace charges us. It never changes your price.
Programs we could earn from, and don't link
These are affiliate programs we've either joined or seriously considered, and deliberately link nowhere on this site — because we haven't earned the right to recommend them. Listing them is the point: a programme we could profit from is worth disclosing whether or not we're currently using it.
- z.ai — we do not actually pay for the plan this link sells. Our tools run on the free tier, so we would be recommending something we have never bought.
- PromptBase — these are our own listings on another marketplace, and we stopped adding to them. We would rather not point you at a shelf nobody is restocking.
- Jobscan — we have not used it ourselves yet, so we have nothing honest to tell you about it.
- ElevenLabs — we do not link it, because the audio you actually hear on this site is made with a free voice model that runs on our own machine — not with them. We do keep an ElevenLabs-backed voice endpoint available on the site, so it would be wrong to tell you we never touch them.
- Kimi (Moonshot AI) — we have not managed to complete a real piece of work on it yet. Until we have, we have nothing honest to tell you about it.
Why we're this upfront
Because trust is the whole product. If a recommendation here ever feels less than straight with you, tell us and we'll fix it — that's a promise we can keep because the list above is short on purpose.